by H. E. Bates
‘Never get the bloody wood ready the rate you’re going on, never see the money back. Shift your bloody self.’
They had come to clear the timber that was left. They were half-gipsies, dealers in old-iron, rags, horses, firewood, anything to be picked up cheap and sold for quick profit. And Marko had made a bargain with the manager of the timber company, whereby for next to nothing they might have as much wood as they could clear and saw in a month. In October they would set off, in the motor-van, and run from town to town and sell the logs. There was money in it. It all depended on how hard they worked, how much wood they sawed before October. After that it was easy. Now, while the wood was dry, and the days still long, they must slave like madmen, hardly stopping to eat.
At first they brought the wood to the van, spending one day dragging out the tree boughs with ropes and the next sawing them with a cross-cut saw. The first days of rope and saw blistered their hands and the blisters split with a salty pain, leaving raw spots that would not heal. The saw-handle became like hot iron and the spray of sawdust intolerably parching. The dust seemed to get down to the lungs of the younger man, setting him coughing in dry raking fits which exhausted him but which had no effect on the insistence of his brother’s perpetual torment. Were they going to saw the blasted wood or weren’t they? Either they’d got to do better than this or jack up. No good going on like it. If one could do it the other could. Half a minute? — Christ! nothing but half a minute. How many more half minutes? He would squat there in a derisive attitude of waiting, spitting rankly on his hands, the very sweat on his dark face expressive of his coarse strength, while the young man licked his dust-dry lips and tried to conceal or lessen his desperate panting for breath, his face pale with pain, his hands resting on his knees, white and strengthless, until at last the elder man, impatient of it, would mutter his black snarl and seize the saw-handle and pull it in motion, his brother’s hand mechanically catching at it and pulling also, falling into the old automatic motion stupidly.
At the end of the fourth day Joe, the younger man, had an idea. It was he who drove the motor-van, and in the evenings, as he tinkered with the engine, cleaning the plugs, trying to correct some tapping in the engine, he seemed to shake off the weariness of the day and come to life.
He was alone when he had the idea that they might run a circular saw off the back wheel of the van. His brother had gone off into the wood on the prowl. There were no longer any keepers, but the life of the wood remained — foxes taking refuge in the impassable ruin of boughs, an odd pheasant, a wood-pigeon roosting in a surviving hazel-clump, a swarm of rabbits. Very often the men heard the high squeal of the stoat-bitten rabbit and could, by running towards the sound, scare the stoat and find the rabbit before the bloodsucking had begun. If there were no rabbit by evening, Marko prowled round, lingering till darkness very often for the chance of a roosting pheasant, while Joe tinkered with the motor engine and replenished the cooking-fire. They had their last meal in the dusk, by the fire, and then slept in the van.
Across the road from the wood stood a solitary house, new-looking, of bright red brick, occupied by a thin stooping man who limped across to the wood to watch the two men sawing and to talk with them. He was an ex-soldier and limped from a wound in the leg and from time to time he would roll up his trousers and display the wound-scar, recounting the story. But the two brothers were unimpressed. They dragged in boughs, sawed them and added to the dry yellow stack of billets as though he did not exist. Only in this did they resemble each other, in their derision, unconscious and unspoken, of the outsider. They could convey that derision in a spit which left behind it a scornful silence, but derision and spit and scorn were all lost on the thin man, who would go on talking to them in a Cockneyish voice of whining familiarity, sucking at a cigarette and between the sentences, oblivious.
‘Daresay you wouldn’t believe it. But there’s a bullet in my leg yet. You can’t see it now. It seems to disappear in dry weather and then show again when it rains. Soon as it rains again I’ll show it you. See? This leg’s like a weather-glass. The bullet begins to show when there’s rain about. What do you think of that?’
They would make no answer: only the silence or spit of contempt. But once the elder brother remarked: ‘You can give us the tip when it’s going to rain, then, eh?’ and thereafter the man came across the road each evening, smoking the perpetual stained fag-end, and turned up his trousers. There was never a sign of the bullet and the parching heat continued, the leaves of the remaining hazels curling and shrivelling, the thistles and willow-herb making a transparent silken storm of seed which floated over the scorched wood, never ceasing, in the blazing sunshine.
The man appeared, as usual, limping up the riding by the sawdust heaps, as the younger man sat by the van pondering over the new idea of the circular saw, working out the mechanics of it in his mind, deriding himself gently for not having thought of it sooner.
Hearing the footsteps, he glanced up. For the first time he was glad to see the limping man. He could hardly close his fingers for the pain of the broken blisters made by the rope and the cross-saw.
Seeing him by the van, pondering, as if in dejection, the man began: ‘Look as if you’ve lost something.…’
But Joe interrupted quickly: ‘D’ye know anybody what’s got a circular saw? To sell or hire, don’t matter. We can pay. I’ve been thinking how we could run one off the motor.’
‘Circular saw?’ the man repeated. ‘I’ve got a circular saw myself. The timber chaps left it — they used to draw water from my well and they sort of left the saw —’ he seemed to become embarrassed, the tentative note in his voice an excuse in itself. ‘It wants fitting up, that’s all. It’s a good saw.’
‘D’ye want to sell it? Can I have a look at it?’
‘Yes, you can look at it.’
‘Now?’
‘Now if you like—it’s across at my place, in a shed.’
The gipsy began to walk away eagerly, the ex-soldier limping after him, and ten minutes later they returned, with the gipsy carrying the circular saw wrapped up in sacks.
‘Then if you can fit it up,’ the limping man was saying, ‘you’ll borrow it and let me have enough wood for winter for the hire of it. That’s it, is it?’
‘Ah,’ said the gipsy, absently. He was gazing at the sun-baked ground, lost in thought.
‘You’ll want a running belt,’ said the man.
The gipsy was down on his knees, gazing beneath the van. Intent on the saw and the motor, he was transformed, his actions full of a fervent vitality, his mind entranced by its new idea, the limping man forgotten.
‘All right, all right,’ he said once, looking up and seeing him still there, ‘we can fix it.’ When he looked up again the man was limping away by the heaps of sawdust.
By noon the following day he had fixed up the saw, the first high mournful whanging moan of the steel in the wood making strange reverberations among the dead trees. The weather was still unchanged, cloudless and oppressive, the heat striking back intolerably from the shadeless earth and the scattered sawdust. He had worked at the saw since daylight, moving the van to more level ground, jacking up the axle, worried alternately by the difficulties of the problem and by the attitude of his brother, who by spits and monosyllables and half-spoken words conveyed his contempt for the scheme, halting each time he made a journey from the wood with his load of boughs or logs, which he roped together and dragged behind him. Yet he never openly opposed the scheme; he offered no argument against it, only the half-glance or half-word of ridicule, softly bitter and provoking.
And strangely enough, at noon, when the saw was finished and whining in motion, he accepted it. Yet the old deprecating infuriating half-murmur of contempt was still there.
‘Just about hangs together, don’t it? Might do. Might try it.’
He looked it over, feeling the vibration of the saw on the wooden framework, watching the driving-belt. The younger brother, worried at first by
the problem of the belt and the saw-frame, had searched among the odds and ends of machinery by the workmen’s huts and had found the old saw-frame and some lengths of broken belt which he had riveted together. And now he was so proud of the work which had sweated him into a state of weariness that as before the derision of his brother was lost on him. His idea had been conceived, the work done. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Tired, he switched off the engine, the saw sighed to stillness, and he turned to look in the van for something to eat. But the voice of Marko arrested him:
‘Ah, what yer switching off for? Go on, switch it on again. I want to try it.’
Joe, leaning across the driving wheel, obediently started up the engine again. A moment later, with a loaf in his hands, he heard the whanging moan of saw cutting into wood. Sitting down on the earth, he watched his brother testing the saw with log after log while he himself ate the bread with lumps of cold bacon.
When he had finished eating he got up, ready to take his brother’s place. But the chance did not come. Deliberate, arrogant, Marko never moved from the saw. He fed it with a kind of contemptuous zest, as though ridiculing it, yet keeping the young man from working it. At his feet the pile of sawn yellowish logs was growing quickly. He held the wood to the saw with immense strength, never pausing or relaxing, as implacable and powerful as the saw itself.
Soon, too, the heap of uncut boughs began to dwindle. The younger man sidled about, watching the saw, the motor, and his brother by turns, ill at ease, fidgeting, eager for his turn at the saw. But Marko never relaxed.
Finally came a sudden shout above the clatter and whine of the saw and the motor:
‘Get some bloody wood along, can’t you? — go on, quick! Go on!’
The brother hesitated, half-stubborn, half-afraid, and Marko raised the billet in his hand as if to hurl it.
‘Want me to knock your bleeding head off?’
There was a moment’s pause, like a flicker of defiance, but in another moment the boy was walking towards the wood with the rope in his hands.
The whine of the saw continued all afternoon, with melancholy echoes. The ex-soldier limped across the road to watch and smoke the eternal fag-end and offer approval: ‘That’s better beer, eh?’ while Marko fed the saw with the boughs that Joe dragged in from the wood. The heap of billets and the pale pyramid of sawdust grew wonderfully.
It was the same on the following day, and all through the next. The saw ran unceasingly, Marko working it, Joe dragging in the boughs, the ex-soldier looking on, the piles of billets and dust growing rapidly. For ten minutes, on the second day, the saw broke down and Joe hurried down the riding, dragging the faggot of boughs, to put it right. Then the racket and whine went on again, breaking harshly the strange stillness that had come down over the wood in the pause. The still sunshine and the drought continued also. ‘The old bullet’ll die of thirst if this keeps on,’ said the ex-soldier, but the brothers offered no remark. They scarcely spoke, now, to each other. When the saw had been repaired Marko offered not a single word of approval or satisfaction; and Joe said nothing. He walked back to the wood with the rope in silence, as if he no longer cared.
The following evening, the third of working the new saw, a cart and pony drove unexpectedly down the road and up the riding, swaying and pitching over the sun-baked wheel-ruts, halting just beyond the motor-van before the men were aware of it, the sound of its coming drowned under the rattle and moan of the saw.
In the cart was a woman, black-haired, youngish, hatless, with a white shawl crossed gipsy-fashion over her pink blouse.
She stood up in the cart and throwing the reins on the horse’s back shouted at the men. The racket of the saw drowned her voice so that they did not hear.
‘Hey-up! Hey-up!’ she called again.
It was the boy who heard and noticed her first.
‘Marko, Marko,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s the wife.’
He went to the van to shut off the engine, Marko threw down the billet he had sawn, and together they walked towards the cart. The woman was climbing down from the cart.
‘Ye never told us,’ muttered Marko.
‘How could I tell you?’ she flashed. ‘How was I to let you know? I been all over the damn place.’
‘All right, all right,’ he muttered. ‘You’re here now.’
The flash of antagonism, their only greeting, died down quickly again. They exchanged another word or two, of commonplace things, the younger brother throwing in an odd remark, and then the woman began to unharness the pony and the men went back to the saw, as though nothing had happened.
The men worked on in the warm evening, the woman busy about the fire, watching them, sometimes, with her hands on her hips, her strong, big-boned face shrewd even in its preoccupation, her eyes alert even in their immobility, the trembling ear-rings under the thick black loops of hair giving her a flashy air, half-beautiful. At first she was too occupied to notice much, to see anything more than Marko at the saw and Joe dragging the loads of boughs down the riding. There was nothing significant in that, but she wondered idly once or twice about the saw, wondering where they had picked it up, how they had made it work, and she was faintly astonished at the stack of billets.
But suddenly, standing idle, she sensed it all in a flash. Coming in once from the wood Joe threw down the rope and put one hand to his mouth and licked the palm, slowly and luxuriously, so that she saw instantly the pain and relief in his face. And in a moment she half-divined that the idea of the saw was his. He alone had the machine-sense. Marko could never have done it. A second later, still not quite sure, she walked across to Marko, watching him, to ask carelessly:
‘Whose idea was it — the saw?’
‘Joe’s,’ said Marko. ‘He fixed it up.’ His voice was flat, expressionless.
She said no more. But in the evening, when the saw was silent and they sat round the fire, eating, she looked at Joe’s hands and saw the great crimson blisters, kept raw by the rope and boughs, that would not heal.
‘What’s the matter with your hands?’ she said.
‘What’s up with his hands?’ mocked Marko. ‘What’s up with them?’
Joe curled up his hands and would not show them and was silent.
But Marko extended his palms, with a sort of aggressive contempt. They also were scarred with red skinless patches.
‘Poor Marko’s hands,’ he muttered.
The derision was directed through her to the boy. She tried to neutralise it at once by a flash in return.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘Poor Marko’s hands. Poor Marko.’
Joe said nothing. He had heard them quarrel often enough. And the derision he accepted with meekness, too weak to sustain even the thought of anger and retaliation.
In the morning the woman spoke to Joe, alone.
‘Why don’t you work the saw?’
‘Marko works it.’
‘I never asked you that. I said why don’t you work it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you want to work it then?’
‘I don’t care.’
She gave it up, shrugging her shoulders:
‘Well, you know best.’
But all through the morning, as she peeled potatoes and cooked and washed out the men’s oily blue-check shirts, she kept an eye on him. It was necessary, now, for Joe to go farther and farther back into the wood for timber, so that the journeys were longer and the saw often ate through one load of boughs long before another arrived. It meant that the saw must run empty or be shut off, and that Marko must wait empty-handed, furious. When the boy arrived at last the hot spit of that fury met him.
‘Why the hell don’ you shift yourself! I don’ wanna be here all winter! Shift yourself!’
And never a word or gesture of retaliation from the boy. She marvelled at his silence and filled each time with anger and disgust.
In the afternoon, after his first journey into the wood, she said carelessly:
‘I’ll give a hand with that wood.’
She followed Joe up the riding and into the wood, through the ruin of dead boughs and withered thistle-stalks and white-feathered willow-herb, along the path his constant journeys had made through the parched undergrowth. They gathered a load of oak boughs together, not speaking much, and Joe dragged it out of the wood while she prepared another load. Expectantly, she listened to Marko’s voice, and a little later she heard it, deriding the boy, with half-direct, taunting words, because he had allowed her to help him.
She was furious now also.
‘I should think you’re going to stand that, I should think so,’ she said when Joe returned.
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘All right, all right,’ she whispered bitterly. ‘All right when he talks to you like that? Your own brother? I should think so.’
‘I’m used to it.’
‘Used to it! Used to it!’ she half raised her hands. ‘He don’t talk to me like it, I see. You’re hopeless.’
But she would not let him rest. Whenever they were alone together she urged him to retaliate, to show his spirit, to defy Marko. ‘I can see myself letting him say the things he says to you, I’m sure. Do something, boy. Do something.’ And she would argue, rationally, too.
‘Didn’t you fit the saw up? Wasn’t it your idea? You’re his brother ain’t you? You’re as good as he is? If it hadn’t been for you we shouldn’t have been nowhere. Nowhere. Ah! I tell you boy, I tell you, you’re a fool, you’re a fool!’
She kept on in this way all afternoon, lugging savagely at the boughs as she spoke and so giving a strange compulsion and strength to her words. At last he began to take notice, half-agreeing, half-seeing the reason of her words, and catching as it were the reflected fire of her passionate indignation. He’d half a mind to do something. He could see now. He’d half a mind …
